Re: 'testing' packages under 'stable'
On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 05:10:29PM +0100, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Nick Phillips <nwp@lemon-computing.com> writes:
>
> > The other problem that I hinted at above is the fact that too many
> > users feel that they have to move over to testing.
> >
> > Given the way that Debian develops, if a user requires a new feature
> > that's only present in a testing package, they often^Wusually have
> > to essentially go the whole hog and upgrade their whole system to
> > testing. I don't believe that this is a desirable state of affairs
> > (although with the advent of testing it's certainly a whole load
> > better than it used to be, where such users were required to go all
> > the way to unstable).
> >
> > This appears to be largely due to the way shared library
> > dependencies are calculated, and the fact that most people seem to
> > do development on bleeding-edge systems.
> >
> > Surely there must be some way that we can improve this situation -
> > obviously some packages will require major upgrades (like, it really
> > won't work without perl 5.6, or the latest libc or whatever), but I
> > reckon a whole load would work just fine if they'd been built on a
> > stable system - as shown by the number of private repositories of
> > new-packages-built-for-potato that exist.
>
> It might be sufficient to specifically document the procedure for
> building a package from testing under stable, given that it often is
> no more difficult than unpack, build, binary.
There are a lot of woody/unstable packages that will simply not build on
stable, due to Build-Dep's on the new perl or other things that are only
present in unstable.
--Adam
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